S2E09: Discovering Room To Grow! With Guest Sandy Eichel
Will, Amber, and returning guest Sandy Eichel are dressed up in purple and green to celebrate Spring! Sandy shares their joy about early spring flowers, Amber continues that thread sharing her joy about the flower farms and tulip festival in Oregon, and Will’s joy is using butterfly pea flower tea to make color-changing cocktails!
Sandy leads off the discussion about how to find joy in discovering you have room to grow. The hosts and Sandy discuss how to maintain positive motivation when you make a mistake, or when someone else points out a mistake to you. They also discuss some of the ways things can go wrong with someone who isn’t able to accept constructive feedback related to bias. This discussion produces several handy insights into how our emotional reactions to feedback can be used for good, to help us make progress, or how our emotional reactions can lead us astray, if we get too defensive or upset. One major area of discussion includes how some folks can have very strong emotional reactions to issues that don’t actually affect their lives at all (e.g., non-transgender folks having very strong emotional reactions to trans* people just existing). These strong reactions often arise from societal norms, more than any strong personal values that have been consciously examined and adopted. Habit disruption results in frustrated feelings, but try to redirect them and “get curious, not furious”! This discussion also leads the host to talking about how the “coming out” process that LGBTQ+ folks go through often involves examining and challenging societal norms, and also ways to expand your friend group beyond people who are similar to you.
During story time, Sandy shares a negative story about someone being hostile about LGBTQ+ people even existing, and they share a more positive story about someone having a negative reaction to LGBTQ+ topics at first, but they later came around and thanked Sandy for the education Sandy provided. This story time also opens the door for discussion of how you can and should set boundaries and protect yourself during difficult conversations.
This month’s audience question involves pronouns, specifically whether it might be good or useful to use “they” as a default pronoun for everyone until you know their actual gender identity and pronouns. That also opens the door to another question, about cisgender people using “she/they” or “he/they” as their stated pronouns, as a way to signal that they are open and accepting to diverse gender identities.
This episode’s habit-breaking skill is Don’t Rely on Personal Objectivity. It backfires when people bluntly believe that they are objective when making decisions, leading to more, rather than less, bias. Objectivity is something you can strive for, but never think you’ve achieved it. We’re better served by being mindful of ways biases may influence us. This discussion also gets into learning about how to question your self-talk.
The episode wraps up with Sandy’s joyful recommendation of the inspiring, calming, and beautiful reality show, “Escape to the Chateau”, which is a comfort show for Sandy, and it inspires them to try new things. The folks from that show also have a great podcast, called “Dick and Angel’s Chat…eau”.
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